1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate generally to the unification of users' browsing and searching activities online, and the use of said unification to improve various web-mining applications, including the ranking of web documents.
2. Description of Related Art
The behavior of most web users involves both browsing and searching, and these behaviors can be modeled generally by hyperlink and click graphs, respectively. A hyperlink graph is generally a directed graph among web pages where the edges of the graph represent hyperlinks between web documents; a click graph is generally a bipartite graph between search queries submitted to a search engine and web documents linked to by the search results for those queries, where the edges of the graph connect the search queries to the web documents associated with the search results actually clicked on by the user. Conventional methodologies keep the two models apart in their application to various web-mining tasks (e.g., document ranking, spam detection, etc.), where they remain quite susceptible to noise and sub-optimal performance.
Thus, it is desirable to combine both models in a way that is conducive to the combination's application to various web-mining tasks, in an effort to increase the performance, stability, etc. of those tasks.